High Voltage Press

the writing of George Trinkaus

About High Voltage Press

Publishing for 30 years, our theme is lost electric technology, particularly that of Nikola Tesla. We publish quality paperback books and compact booklets in clear English with lots of illustrations. We focus on energy magnification, free energy, home power, suppressed radio technologies, and high-power electric control. We show little respect for the mythologies that govern orthodox academic electric physics. We honor inventions of the past that point to pollution-free, people-empowering technologies of the future.

Who is George Trinkaus?

Trinkaus (tring’ kis), George Belden Writer, publisher.

Born (1936) Pittsburgh. In his youth, a basement electrical experimenter and a novice-class ham. Formally educated at Mercersberg Academy, at Colgate University, (BA, 1959), and at New York University (where his pursuit of an MA yielded to a “grand tour” of Europe).

In New York he was a free-lance medical writer, and writer for the Encyclopedia Americana (where he wrote short entries in a telegraphic style honored here). Held various staff, editorial and administrative posts at Holt, Rinehart & Winston (managing editor, dictionaries), at Harcourt Brace and at Random House (project editor), and at Macmillan (senior editor). At Holt (mid-1960’s) directed the creation of a computerized dictionary word list, using the company’s IBM 360 mainframe and staff, in what may have been the first adventure in word processing for what was then a strictly numerical technology. Editorial areas included lexicography, the new grammar, electronics, industrial technology. Macmillan, his last stop in corporate publishing, transferred him to California (1971), and he remained on the West Coast.

He is author (as George Belden) of an early consumerist book, Tactics of the Bill Collector and How to Fight Back, Grosset & Dunlap, 1974.The book was attacked by the Massachusetts Bar, reviewed as a social phenomenon by The New Republic, and as news by UPI; also it was grist for the radio-TV media mill, was serialized in Family Circle, and was a mass paperback from Ace. A new version written with ex-bill-collector Steve Katz is Bill-Collector Confidential (2009).

He was a book-reviewer for The L.A. Free Press and the book-review editor at The Hollywood Daily News. He was a founder and the director of Bookswest which produced the first L.A. book fairs (1975-78), and he was editor and publisher of BooksWest Magazine, an alternative trade for the book industry. Many leading writers of the time appeared at the BooksWest bookfair and wrote reviews for BooksWest Magazine. For BooksWest, Trinkaus wrote “The Title Glut” (1978) on overproduction and market control in the book industry, which was nominated for article of the year by the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee.

Moved from L.A. to Ojai, California (1980). Arrested four times in civil disobedience actions on nuclear and war issues. A media spokes to the world press at the Diablo Canyon nuke blockade of 1981. A defendant in the “Point Mugu 12” trial.

An organizer of the resistance to the USA Petrochem refinery expansion (1982-83). Served as the community rep on the Ventura County EIR Committee on this issue, which was ultimately resolved by the shut-down of the refinery. Trinkaus’ next land-use issue 24 years later was a resistance to a 35-story office-condo tower in Portland (never finished).

Many public speeches and radio interviews as a spokes for all the above projects.

In mid-1980’s discovered a collection of Nikola Tesla’s U.S. patents, which had been xeroxed at the National Archives. This prompted his study of Tesla’s electric technology. Rediscovered long-neglected scientific passions, set up an electrical lab, and, over the years, from 1986, researched, wrote, and published Tesla the Lost Inventions, Tesla Coil, Son of Tesla Coil, and Radio Tesla. Also edited Tesla’s The True Wireless and the U.S. Navy’s Magnetic Amplifiers. All have been in print from his High Voltage Press and published in e-book by Kindle and by Wheelock Mountain Press. In Oregon since 1989, he was a founder of the Portland Tesla Technology Roundtable.

George Trinkaus died at home in Portand, OR in 2017. His daughter Emily now manages High Voltage Press.